Germaphobe Trump Once Made Anthony Scaramucci Get Penicillin Shot for Sore Throat

Anthony Scaramucci, the short-lived White House communications director, revealed that President Donald Trump once made him go get a penicillin shot for his sore throat on Air Force One.

President Donald Trump waves as he walks on the South Lawn after he returned to the White House December 15, 2017, in Washington, DC. GETTY/Alex Wong

In a radio interview on Friday, Scaramucci said he was with the president on Air Force One and had "a little bit of a sore throat," when he suddenly found himself being taken to the back of the plane to receive a penicillin shot. "He’s a little bit of a germaphobe. He doesn’t like people that don’t feel well sitting around him. So he called the medic in," Scaramucci told host Len Berman on New York's 710 WOR show Len Berman in the Morning.

"Most Americans probably don’t know this, but there’s a full hospital ward on Air Force One...They took me back to the hospital bay, and next thing you know they’re pulling down my pants and they’re giving me a shot of penicillin," he said.

The Mooch said he found the incident funny. "It also tells you about life and our humanity....There I am, traveling on the most famous plane in the world, with the most powerful person on the planet, and my pants are down and I’m taking a shot of penicillin like I was in the second grade."

In the interview, Scaramucci focused mostly on his 11 days in the White House—which he joked he now measures as "954,000 seconds." He also touched on Ryan Lizza's recent firing from The New Yorker, saying it was "karma" for writing an article that led to Scaramucci's own ouster from the White House—a conversation he has always maintained was off the record and private.

The "germaphobe" anecdote was in response to Berman's asking for the best story from his tenure.

Trump is a known germaphobe—he even admitted it himself, in the very first speech he gave after his election, days before his inauguration in January. Making sure to cut straight to the most important issues in his kickoff briefing, Trump told reporters that he's "very much of a germaphobe, by the way. Believe me." (He was denying allegations that he asked prostitutes to urinate on his bed, which were part of a Russia Dossier BuzzFeedpublished.)

He also prefers to drink all of his drinks through a straw, and washes his hands frequently and obsessively, Newsweekreported in September. But his behavior seems to pay off, sometimes.

That penicillin shot? "It worked," Scaramucci said. "The next day, I didn’t have a sore throat."

"The ice doesn’t care what this administration thinks. It’s just going to keep melting," David Titley, the director of the Center for Solutions to Weather and Climate Risk at Penn State, told Newsweek.